Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, although it is applied to all types of systems including human organizations. In electronics, a glitch is an electrical pulse of short duration that is usually the result of a fault or design error, particularly in a digital circuit. For example, many electronic components such as flip-flops are triggered by a pulse that must not be shorter than a specified minimum duration, otherwise the component may malfunction. A pulse shorter than the specified minimum is called a glitch. A related concept is the runt pulse, a pulse whose amplitude is smaller than the minimum level specified for correct operation, and a spike, a short pulse similar to glitch but often caused by ringing or crosstalk. In music, glitch refers to a genre of electronic music that became popular in the late 1990s with the increasing use of digital signal processing, particularly on computers. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.